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> supremacy of capitalism Efficacy is more the word I would have gone for, compared against other systems we have historical evidence for.

by kobeya 9y ago

EGreg 9y ago
Would you call the system on which Open Source Software and Free Software operates capitalism? How about Science? How about Wikipedia? How about languages, is someone paying someone for using a word? Because these systems have led to a lot more advancement, when people can collaborate and add to a growing snowball of work. Wikipedia beat Britannica. Linux + BSD beat Windows. WebKit beat IE. Apache and NGinX beat IIS. Most languages are open source. And so on. And yet in drugs we still have the patent system. And the superbugs are back because we run out of antibiotics. And the USA which has the most patents also pays the most per capita for the same drugs. Who wins from these monopolies? And before you say that Intellectual Property shouldn't be considered property, throwing other anarcho-capitalists under the bus, consider this: if people shouldn't own ideas, should people be able to own large bodies of air, water, land, etc. that they personally will never use? Will that make them more or less likely to become polluted for example?" The same John Locke who popularized the idea of homesteading or "mixing one's labor with the land" as anarcho-capitalists' favorite way to theoretically paper over acquision of natural resources in their theory also emphatically said that a man shouldn't own too much land. Yet that's what Capitalism is. At its core it is about granting PROPERTY to private entities and enforcing it. PROPERTY IS A MONOPOLY RIGHT TO EXCLUDE OTHERS FROM THE USE OF A RESOURCE. And pure unfettered Capitalism recognizes no limits on who can own what, as long as the what isn't other people.
- kobeya 9y ago
  Capitalism is a solution for allocating scarce resources. None of your other examples are solutions to that specific problem. Apples to oranges...
  - EGreg 9y ago
    Oh really. Water in lakes is not a scarce resource for example? Look at what happened at Lake Baikal the largest freshwater lake in the world, and tell me how capitalism improved the use of that resource.

> supremacy of capitalism Efficacy is more the word I would have gone for, compared against other systems we have historical evidence for.

by kobeya 9y ago

> supremacy of capitalism Efficacy is more the word I would have gone for, compared against other systems we have historical evidence for.

EGreg 9y ago

Would you call the system on which Open Source Software and Free Software operates capitalism? How about Science? How about Wikipedia? How about languages, is someone paying someone for using a word? Because these systems have led to a lot more advancement, when people can collaborate and add to a growing snowball of work. Wikipedia beat Britannica. Linux + BSD beat Windows. WebKit beat IE. Apache and NGinX beat IIS. Most languages are open source. And so on. And yet in drugs we still have the patent system. And the superbugs are back because we run out of antibiotics. And the USA which has the most patents also pays the most per capita for the same drugs. Who wins from these monopolies? And before you say that Intellectual Property shouldn't be considered property, throwing other anarcho-capitalists under the bus, consider this: if people shouldn't own ideas, should people be able to own large bodies of air, water, land, etc. that they personally will never use? Will that make them more or less likely to become polluted for example?" The same John Locke who popularized the idea of homesteading or "mixing one's labor with the land" as anarcho-capitalists' favorite way to theoretically paper over acquision of natural resources in their theory also emphatically said that a man shouldn't own too much land. Yet that's what Capitalism is. At its core it is about granting PROPERTY to private entities and enforcing it. PROPERTY IS A MONOPOLY RIGHT TO EXCLUDE OTHERS FROM THE USE OF A RESOURCE. And pure unfettered Capitalism recognizes no limits on who can own what, as long as the what isn't other people.

kobeya 9y ago
Capitalism is a solution for allocating scarce resources. None of your other examples are solutions to that specific problem. Apples to oranges...
- EGreg 9y ago
  Oh really. Water in lakes is not a scarce resource for example? Look at what happened at Lake Baikal the largest freshwater lake in the world, and tell me how capitalism improved the use of that resource.